Albert Bandura

He married Virginia Varns (1921–2011) in 1952, and they raised two daughters, Carol and Mary.

Bandura took psychology courses in college and became passionate about the subject.

Albert Bandura (December 4, 1925 – July 26, 2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist.

He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University.

Bandura was responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology.

Bandura arrived in the US in 1949 and was naturalized in 1956.

Bandura graduated in three years, in 1949, with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then moved to the then-epicenter of psychology, the University of Iowa, from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D in Clinical Psychology in 1952.

Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James, while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators.

During his Iowa years, Bandura came to support a style of psychology that sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing.

His inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation, and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time.

Bandura's expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self-regulation, and provided psychologists with a practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personality psychology.

Upon graduation, he completed his postdoctoral internship at the Wichita Guidance Center.

The following year, 1953, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University, which he held until becoming professor emeritus in 2010.

He is known as the originator of social learning theory, social cognitive theory, and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment.

This Bobo doll experiment demonstrated the concept of observational learning where children would watch an adult beat a doll and as a result do the same.

In 1974, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the world's largest association of psychologists.

Bandura would later state the only reason he agreed to be in the running for the APA election was because he wanted his 15 minutes of fame without any intentions of being elected.

He also worked as a sports coach.

Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning and gave up his research of the psychoanalytic theory.

He directed his initial research to the role of social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action.

In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, he engaged in studies of social learning and aggression.

Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning.

The initial phase of Bandura's research analyzed the foundations of human learning and the willingness of children and adults to imitate behavior observed in others, in particular, aggression.

Bandura found in his research that models were an important source for learning new behaviors and for achieving behavioral change in institutionalized settings.

Social learning theory posits that there are three regulatory systems that control behavior.

First, the antecedent inducements greatly influence the time and response of behavior.

The stimulus that occurs before the behavioral response must be appropriate in relation to social context and performers.

Second, response feedback influences also serve an important function.

Following a response, the reinforcements, by experience or observation, will greatly impact the occurrence of the behavior in the future.

Third, the importance of cognitive functions in social learning.

For example, for aggressive behavior to occur some people become easily angered by the sight or thought of individuals with whom they have had hostile encounters, and this memory is acquired through the learning process.

A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget.

During his lifetime, Bandura was widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

Bandura was born in Mundare, Alberta, an open town of roughly four hundred inhabitants, as the youngest child, in a family of six.

The limitations of education in a remote town such as this caused Bandura to become independent and self-motivated in terms of learning, and these primarily developed traits proved very helpful in his lengthy career.

Bandura was of Polish and Ukrainian descent; his father was from Kraków, Poland, whilst his mother was from Ukraine.

Bandura's parents were a key influence in encouraging him to seek ventures out of the small hamlet they resided in.

The summer after finishing high school, Bandura worked in the Yukon to protect the Alaska Highway against sinking.

Bandura later credited his work in the northern tundra as the origin of his interest in human psychopathology.

It was in this experience in the Yukon, where he was exposed to a subculture of drinking and gambling, which helped broaden his perspective and scope of views on life.